YAHOO! MERGER WITH BING GIVES A BOOST TO GOOGLE
After one year, CEO tries to explain away 'negative value'
- Dateline
- 18 August 2010
Last year’s merger between Yahoo! and Microsoft’s search business, has had unforeseen consequences on the overall search and advertising market.
In the middle of 2009 Yahoo! and Microsoft had a market share of 19.5% and 8.5% of the US search market respectively.
Rather than the merger consolidating and improving their market share in search, today’s numbers of a total market share of just 20% show that the merger has been a negative for the partners and extremely positive for Google, whose market share now stands at 75% in the USA.
Disappointing financial results continue to plague Microsoft as its operating system and Office software sales have shown no signs of a much-promised ‘take off’ post the Credit Crunch.
Meanwhile, Google continues to threaten Microsoft’s core business with the success of its Wave platform and the whole notion of web browser-based (rather than operating system-based) applications.
Investment website 24/7 Wall Street estimates that Google could destroy 20-30% of Microsoft’s core business in the next 24 months.
Already investors appear to be discounting Microsoft’s future troubles as the stock closed down on a strong ‘sell’ recommendation yesterday.
It is not all good news for Google. Anti-trust actions in the US, China and EU are starting again – and this time the target is not Microsoft, but Google.
Welcome to the price of unbridled success.
Links to related stories
- Microsoft deal talk, optimism overshadow results - Reuters, 19 July 2009
- Why a search deal with Microsoft would be the beginning of the end for Yahoo - The Guardian, 17 July 2009
- Microsoft's Bing continues to steal market share from Google - The Telegraph, 1 July 2009
- Microsoft and Yahoo! rumoured to be close to sealing search deal - The Telegraph, 17 July 2009
- Google Wave to open September 30: Google has announced that Google Wave, it’s new real-time online communication and collaboration tool for friends, will go live at the end of September - The Telegraph, 22 July 2009
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